Fiction review: 'Private Life' by Jane Smiley

"Private Life," perhaps Jane Smiley's best novel since her Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Thousand Acres," is so firmly anchored in its historical setting that the past comes to seem like the reader's present. Three wars haunt its pages, beginning with the Civil War, still dividing Margaret Gentry's rural Missouri community decades after its end.

A spinster at 23, Margaret enjoys her solitude. To her, the only thing more pleasurable than burying herself in a good book may be skimming down a deserted road on a borrowed bicycle: "Though her cheeks burned in the cold, she was warm with the exertion. Though her arms trembled with the effort, her legs felt strong ... She had heard of bicycle clubs traveling vast distances ...." At the end of her exhilarating ride, Margaret encounters the dauntingly taciturn Andrew Early and feels compelled to walk on with him "in as congenial a manner as she could."

Their mothers launch an anxious, carefully managed campaign to get Andrew to propose. Finally, he does. Her mother tells her, "you've had a piece of luck, marrying at twenty-seven, but a wife only has to do as she's told for the first year." Margaret will have cause to remember this advice. Meanwhile, she struggles to adapt herself to marriage. Andrew, now an astronomer at the naval base in Vallejo, Calif., has a brilliant, creative mind and utter confidence in his theories about twin stars, lunar craters and the potential seriousness of an obscure outbreak of disease in Kansas as World War I begins: "Very like this flu they've had in Spain." But he is equally, bitterly certain that other scientists are conspiring to suppress his ideas. Margaret becomes adept at deflecting him from irrational, rage-fueled rants against his supposed enemies.

She carves out space for friendship: Dora is the spinster Margaret might have been, a free-spirited international reporter not doomed to a life of penury after all; Pete is a Russian refugee and wellspring of questionably accurate tales; Naoko Kimura is the American-born daughter of a midwife for Vallejo's Japanese immigrants. But as World War II begins and Andrew grows ever more obsessed with his theories, Margaret's world shrinks and tightens. "She had agreed with him more often than not over the years, hadn't she, and as soon as she agreed, he looked past her for a grander and more satisfying embrace. The hugeness of his ideas made her small, and then the smallness of her agreement goaded him to seek more." To her horror, she finds choices she has made within the privacy of her marriage have spilled outside it to threaten people she cares about.

To what extent, this novel asks, does Margaret's suppression of herself and failure to challenge her husband's grandiosity make her responsible for his acts? Smiley's taut focus keeps the novel concentrated on Margaret and her times. But after turning the last page, readers may find themselves extrapolating beyond Margaret's three wars to those of our own time.